The World-Wide Web (WWW, W3, the Web) is an Internet client-server hypertext distributed information retrieval system. An extensive user community has developed on the Web since its public introduction. On the Web everything (documents, menus, indices) is represented to the user as a hypertext object in hypertext markup language (HTML) format. Hypertext links refer to other documents by their universal resource locators (URLs). The client program, known as a browser, e.g. NCSA Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, runs on the user's computer and provides two basic navigation operations: to follow a link or to send a query to a server.
A variety of client and server software is freely available. Most clients and servers support "forms" which allow the user to enter arbitrary text as well as selecting options from customizable menus and on/off switches. As more business is transacted on the Web, forms are proliferating. The forms may include forms for requesting further information, for ordering items from the Web, for registering for a Web site, etc.
Currently, the user has to fill out each of these forms separately. Generally, the forms request the same types of information, i.e. name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, etc. The user has to enter all of this information for each form. This is repetitious and takes time. Additionally, if such information as credit card number or social security number is requested, the user has to pull out the credit card and copy a long string of numbers. This makes errors likely. Furthermore, the user has to verify that a Web site that requests a credit card number or similar information generally kept confidential, is of the appropriate level of security for the user to feel comfortable sending the information over the Web.